Vodafone buys into Turkey

Vodafone has won the auction to buy Turkey’s second largest mobile operator Telsim. The price was $4.6bn, widely regarded as bit expensive, and Vodafone is also expected to commit about $1bn to the companyover the next three years to improve services.

The Turkish market is widely regarded as a major growth opportunity; the purchase of Telsim follows a string of hefty Vodafone investments recently – the £1.3bn for an increased stake in South Africa’s Vodacom in November, £840m for 10% of the Indian telco Bharti in October, and $3.5bn spent in the Czech Republic and Romania last spring.

Vodafone Group’s sales for the year ending in March 2005 stood at $64bn.